My name is Steve, Steve Chen, I am most well known for
being one of the co-founders of YouTube and
one of the probably the earliest employees of PayPal, PayPal link.
And a little known fact I was also one of the earliest engineers at Facebook
for about 3 months before so
that was kind of this in sandwich between PayPal and starting YouTube.
I was working at Facebook and so in 2005 when I was filing my taxes,
I was filing taxes with both PayPal, Facebook and YouTube on it.
And I don't think anybody else can make that claim, ever.
[LAUGH] I think for a while there, so I left YouTube in about 2009, 2010.
And probably for the first 12 months there, was trying to figure out, because
all throughout the twenties and even early 30 was just working on startups.
And it was always the kind of, there's no difference between Monday, Wednesday,
Saturday, Sunday there's no difference between whatever, 9 AM and
3 AM in the morning.
And so I've been doing that for over a decade,
and I was always thinking throughout that decade while I was having fun.
There were all these other things just starting to get into coffee and
photography and headphones and just speakers and watching all these
movies that came out throughout all that time that I never got a chance to watch.
But after the first 12 months I just realized that none of it is as fun
as kind of the challenge and the excitement,
the sort of just everything that motivates people to start companies.
Nothing really compares to that,
so got back into starting a company and so that's what I'm doing now.
I went back to Google, Google Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence for
about 18 months and got the support from Google Ventures.
And then just about a month and
a half ago in August of 2015, left Google Ventures because we were ready
to start getting external funding and doing our own hiring.
With the early days of YouTube started and
sort of in that 2005 time frame.
I think that the idea and domain name itself,
we bought it on Valentine's Day, so February 14th 2005.
There was another co-founder, Chad Hurley,
we were in Menlo Park California and if you can imagine we search for
a YouTube on Google and zero results came up, right.
And so we went out,
bought the domain name youtube.com and started talking about this site.
The site itself originally the idea was, it's a little embarrassing
to talk about but it was actually supposed to be kind of a dating site.
It was supposed to be a dating site where instead of posting your
personal pictures and your personal introduction you would post a video and
that would just aggregate everything together.
A little introduction to yourself but you would actually see this person and
be able to interact with them.
Which you know we started developing all the back end was still more or
less the same as of what you see with YouTube today.
Being able to upload videos.
Being able to transcode videos.
Being able to embed these videos onto different sites out there on to social
networking sites.
And the development of the site took about three months.
And we launched in May of 2005.
And for the first week, it was a total flop.
We didn't get a single video uploaded.
That was within the category domain of
what we thought the site was going to be.
Nobody was introducing themselves using the site as a video dating site.
However, what we saw was that videos were being uploaded and
so within that first week, we quickly changed.
Again the back end of the site, we made exactly the same.
It was just changing, instead of searching for male or female in the age,
you would just search for whatever you wanted to search for in a video.
And the look and feel of it was changed a bit,
but it was a very quick two day effort to convert
what was a sort of a dating video site into a general video site.
And one of the things is, Chad, I met Chad,
the other cofounder at PayPal, the first day I moved out here to California.
He was the original designer of PayPal and I was one of the first engineers and
we worked on a number of projects together at PayPal, And same thing,
I think one of the ideas of startups and success of startups
is this idea of pivoting from what you're originally starting to do and
something else instead.
And PayPal, many people know what it is now, many people use it as
a P2P payment service or personal business payment service.
But when it first started, it was this palm pilot security application
that one, it never really got off the ground as a security app.
And two, these days I don't know many people that still own,
carry around palm pilots.
But the valuable lesson there was just, if you take a look at what the users
are doing, what the user feedback is, and if people aren't using it, taking
that technology and maybe pivoting it to something that the users will use.
And we did that at PayPal when we took the security side of it and
created a payment service on top of it, and the same thing at YouTube.
And in the beginning it was not so,
the relationship with MySpace started with just the ability for
MySpace users to embed HTML onto their profile pages and YouTube had
an HTML snippet that you could copy and paste and put into your MySpace profile.
After a while it became more of a formal relationship because so
many of their users were using YouTube, but it became almost a marriage.
That if YouTube went down,
so much of the content on MySpace would not be available to view.
So we started actually formalizing that relationship when we became,
we became aware that so many of their users depended on our service.
I think especially early on in a start up in a company when you
have very limited internal resources, right.
I think some of these partnerships,
especially early on when you don't get a lot of these invites,
a lot of people asking you to be a partner, you get easily excited by it.
I do think that it's valuable to not be overly
aggressive in accepting some of these partnerships.
So early on at YouTube but
sort of an example of this was, we had a lot of people asking us for
white labeling the product and just removing YouTube off the label,
removing sort of any references to YouTube, and they just wanted us and
were willing to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for this.
And at that time, that meant a lot for a YouTube.
But at the end of the day, we always still hinged on
the fact that the brand name of YouTube was very important to the product.
And the earlier the company I think,
the more resource starved the company, the harder it is to make that decision.
But I do think that it's very important to actually choose
the right partnerships that actually will help the company in the long
run rather than just something in the next few months or next few weeks.
I think that there are even a few companies that wanted to put their own
video player on YouTube.
When I was there, we didn't allow it.
I think now YouTube has accepted some of those deals.
But I think it's a whole different world by this point.
And some of these guys, I mean they just, it's like ABC or something,
there's like only one unique creator of this content,
you either do it their way or you'll never get their content.
I think it's important to approach the question of
any kind of partnership or any kind of agreement is looking at it,
from their perspective what they benefit from a deal in the making with you,
and I think in the case of YouTube it was always the same.
We didn't provide the revenue share, really.
We didn't do the sort of ads early on,
at least when we were there prior to the acquisition by Google.
So when we did these deals it was always for marketing purposes, it was always.
Yes, prior to the acquisition of Google, there was still
not a lot of ads coming in, so there was not a lot of ad revenue, so
there was not a lot of the revenue share that you see on YouTube.
So, what can we actually offer the content creators out there.
It was really still for, at that time,
it was really still for short length content.
So things are 30 seconds to two and a half minutes.
It wasn't for long length.
In fact, we had a rule that no content could be longer than 10 minutes for
the large chunk of the start of YouTube.
And so it was for short-length content.
It wasn't for, so
you wouldn't upload an entire 30 minute episode of The Daily Show or something.
You wouldn't upload an entire two hour movie.
One, we didn't allow it.
And two, we didn't want the platform to be seen as that.
It was still for short pieces of content that was uploaded to the site.
So when it came to actually working with these content creators,
we branded YouTube as a way to be able to market your longer form content.
So it was just maybe seen as a place, a platform to show movie trailers for
your movie, but you wouldn't actually upload the entire movie onto YouTube.
I think that's gradually evolved and
changed over a period of time as higher quanlity content has become possible.
A bandwidth of 30 getting cheaper, people are more accustomed to watching
this content on multiple devices now that YouTube actually offers and
caters to watching the same content on multiple devices at one time.
But at the time during 2005 all the way throughout 2007 it was always sort of
short form content, it wasn't the same quality.
And it was a way to be able to get more people that would have not heard your
music or would've not heard your movie be able to use the two minute length to
be able to showcase whatever it is that you wanted to show.